Information and insight from the A&M Webmasters

This week we continued our effort to migrate our web hosting to virtual servers hosted by TAMU IT We already have several of our services running there, and have been pleased with the results. It allows us to increase the reliability and redundancy of our sites by using load-balanced clusters of virtual servers rather than hosting them on our own single-purpose machines. This week we moved all of our static HTML pages onto one such cluster. The next step, in a few months, will be to pull out all of our web application sites and put them on a similar system.

Breaking out our static pages lets us experiment with alternative setups that will hopefully allow us to improve performance on both these sites and the web applications. For example, the HTML servers will be running nginx, which should be considerably faster than Apache for these types of static pages. Now that (most of) these sites are in the content management system, even minor slowdowns like using server-side includes will be largely eliminated.

Creating a top-notch hosting environment has been an ongoing project for the last five years, but the end is finally in sight.